The Honor of a Lifetime

Today is my last full day at the Pennsylvania Department of Education , and I want to thank all the amazing students, educators, librarians, parents, advocates, and Department of Education staff that have shown me so much grace and support during my time here. It was the honor of a lifetime to serve in this role, and I poured my heart into it.

With the Wolf administration winding down, I've been reflecting on my last nine months serving as the Acting Secretary of Education, and my last nine years working for Governor Wolf. There is so much to be proud of that Governor Wolf has accomplished that I am honored to have played a small role in during my 6-7 years in the Governor's Office: one million people have health insurance today that did not in 2014, and the uninsured rate is the lowest it has ever been in history, because Governor Wolf expanded access to Medicaid and established Pennie, our state-based health insurance exchange; medical marijuana is now legal, which is providing relief to hundreds of thousands of people for whom traditional pharmaceuticals simply did not help; the Opioid Command Center began to tackle the heroin and opioid substance use crisis head-on; Community HealthChoices, Pennsylvania's Medicaid managed care program for seniors and those with disabilities, is allowing people to receive care in their homes instead of having to resort to institutionalization; countless lives were saved as he navigated the COVID-19 pandemic with integrity and honesty; and yes, beer and wine can now be purchased in grocery stores.

But above all else, I believe Governor Wolf's legacy will rest on his commitment to education.

Tom Wolf ran for Governor in 2014 because he cared about education. Like others, he was appalled that in 2014, the commonwealth's finances and the finances of schools across Pennsylvania were in tatters. Schools had just suffered $1 billion in cuts and been forced to lay off 20,000 teachers across the state. The commonwealth was down to its last $200,000 in the Rainy Day Fund, which is enough to keep state government running for about ten minutes. We had a $2 billion - $3 billion structural budget deficit. What little state funding schools did receive was distributed inequitably. His 2014 campaign, which I was fortunate to work on, was built around his promise to make education the number one priority in Harrisburg and invest in a brighter future for children.

And he has done just that. He's invested more in education than any other Pennsylvania governor ever. We now have a Fair Funding Formula to allocate funds to schools more equitably, based on things like the concentration of poverty, sparsity, median household income, and local effort. We established the Level Up program, which is accelerating funding for the 100 school districts most historically underfunded. And he's done all of this in a fiscally-responsible way: we now have $5 billion in the Rainy Day Fund and more than a $5 billion annual budget surplus. He will be the first governor in my lifetime to turn over a budget surplus to his successor.

I will be forever proud of so many of our accomplishments in the last nine months while I've been serving in the Secretary role, none of which could have happened without years of service preceding me by former Secretaries Pedro A. Rivera and Noe Ortega :

We secured the most historic education funding increases in Pennsylvania’s history as part of the 2022-23 budget signed into law by Governor Wolf in July 2022, representing a nearly $2 billion single-year increase, including: a $525 million increase in Basic Education Funding through the Fair Funding Formula; a $225 million increase in Level Up funding targeted to support the 100 most in-need school districts; a $100 million increase in Special Education Funding; a $79 million increase for early education funding through Pre-K Counts and Head Start; a $90 million to stabilize the child care workforce through recruitment and retention payments; a $100 million for student mental health supports through Ready to Learn Block Grants; a $100 million increase in school safety grants; a $220 million increases for public higher education; and, a much-needed and long-overdue $11 million increase for public libraries.

We developed and published a new Five Year Plan for the Office of Commonwealth Libraries, which is focused on refining and improving statewide services and impact, empowering libraries at the local level to develop sustainable and scalable practices in serving their communities and connecting with the statewide educational ecosystem in meaningful ways – spotlighting the role libraries play in every Pennsylvanian’s learning journey and elevating and celebrating the work and impact of librarians.

We developed and began implementing The Foundation of Our Economy: Pennsylvania Educator Workforce Strategy, our 3-year plan comprised of dozens of action steps to be taken between now and 2025 that will ensure a robust pipeline of teachers in our classrooms for years to come and address our educator workforce crisis head-on. The plan focuses on meeting the educator staffing needs of rural, suburban, and urban areas; building a diverse workforce representative of the students we serve; operating a rigorous, streamlined, and customer-service oriented certification process; ensuring high-quality preparation experiences for aspiring educators; and ensuring educator access to high-quality and relevant professional growth and leadership development opportunities.

We partnered with the Center for Schools and Communities to develop a Pennsylvania-specific mobile and desktop app, Finding Your Way in PA, which can help students and families experiencing homelessness connect with local services and resources.

We created the Hunger Free Campus Initiative, which will help ensure access to free, healthy food on college campuses across Pennsylvania and provides a special designation and funding opportunities to campuses that enhance food pantries, increase Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) outreach, improve data collection, and participate in other initiatives that help meet the nutritional needs of students.

We ensured no kid will start the day without access to a good meal by dedicating $21.5 million to provide for universal free breakfast in all Pennsylvania schools, public and private.

Following historic investments in public education, we officially removed Erie Public Schools, the School District of the City of York, and the Scranton City School District from their financial watch and recovery statuses, representing the first school districts in a financial watch or recovery status of any kind being removed from that designation after a successful turnaround stories.

We published Structured Literacy Program Framework Guidelines, which align with the International Dyslexia Association’s Knowledge and Practice Standards. Structured Literacy is an evidence-based best practice for teaching children how to read by focusing on five essential components: phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension. Pennsylvania’s educator prep programs must integrate these competencies into their certification programs by August 1, 2024, and the continuing professional development plans of each school entity must include training in structured literacy competencies and standards.

We implemented new Culturally-Relevant and Sustaining Education (CR-SE) Program Framework Guidelines, which will be required for all educator prep programs starting in 2024, and will ensure teachers are trained in approaches to mental wellness, trauma-informed approaches to instruction, technological and virtual engagement, and cultural awareness. Ultimately, the aim of these competencies is to ensure equity for all students and eliminate systemic institutional racial and cultural barriers that inhibit the success of students.

I could fill pages with all the other things I am proud of about the Wolf administration and the Department of Education, and I am excited knowing Khalid Mumin, Ed.D is going to take our education system to even greater heights.

But lastly, I want to sincerely thank Governor Wolf for all the faith he has entrusted in me over the last nine years. There is no question in my mind that we are leaving behind an education system in far better shape than when you found it.

And I'd like to think we all had a little fun while doing it.

From the bottom of my heart, thank you.